Nancy Reddy (1)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom.

When Nancy Reddy had her first child she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Reddy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, show more and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood "right" feel so wrong?

For answers Reddy turned to the mid-20th century social scientists and psychologists whose work still forms the basis of so much of what we believe about parenting. It seems ludicrous to imagine modern moms taking advice from mid-century researchers, yet their bad ideas about so-called “good” motherhood have seeped pervasively into our cultural norms. In The Good Mother Myth, Reddy debunks the flawed lab studies, sloppy research, and straightforward misogyny of researchers from Harry Harlow, who claimed to have discovered love by observing monkeys in his lab, to the famous Dr. Spock, whose bestselling parenting guide included just one illustration of a father interacting with his child. Blending history of science, cultural criticism, and memoir, The Good Mother Myth pulls back the curtain on the flawed social science behind our contemporary understanding of what makes a good mom.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Misogyny begins at home. You drink it in with your mother's milk. She is, after all, "just your mother." That phrase resounds in my brain as one of the most invidious, viprously poisonous idiocies that passes unquestioned from many a mouth.

The myth of Motherhood is exalted...pedestalized...and thus an extremely effective weapon in misogyny's arsenal of control. A woman, a human female, is reduced to her biological capacity for reproduction. It is an important function but not, as the Cult of the Mother makes it, a predestination and (not incidentally) a life sentence.

The author's struggles with the reality of being a mother versus the snake-oil sold to her by The Cult of Mother led her into paths of research done during my, and my generation's, childhoods. It was done by men. It was deeply embedded in capitalist norms then being solidified, codified, and imposed to create a Cult of Mother to support a culture of mothers without agency since that belonged to husbands and experts. Never mind that the sample sizes were uneven and the methodology unreliable, uncintrolled often enough; never mind that a lot of the research designs adopted were unethical. Hear the Word of Your Lord And Master, woman: feel this or be forever lacking, wanting in human feeling, LESS THAN.

It's a vicious self-springing trap for someone in a deep emotional, existential, physical crisis often enough exacerbated by sudden and/or acute depression. Author Reddy takes us through the orthodoxies of our youth, hers too, and parallels them with her own struggles.

What this book sets out to offer the reader is a footing to view the mountain of garbage "science" and the reeking cesspits of "how YOU should feel" liberally sprayed with "...but it's NATURAL" as though Nature isn't the one and only source of all the ills and plagues of Humanity's time on Earth. Yes, it is. We too are part of Nature, not apart from, above it.

Our actions are natural, they can not be otherwise because we live within the laws of nature.

I offer four stars to the read, not docked too far for its lack of rigor...her models for that failing are the great and good of the subject's past...or for its tooth-gritting tendency to repeat itself...see previous parenthetical...but in recognition of its undeniable attack from within the fortress by a victim of The Cult of Mother, therewith to offer aid and comfort to others who experience what she has.

That deserves all five stars. I can't honestly warble my fool lungs out about the execution. It's above average and it makes its case clearly if anecdotally. It is a read that spoke my truth to me, so I resonate to its vibes.

Women: Do NOT settle for becoming what your biology hands you. Decide for yourself who and what you want to be.

Signed, A Pissed-off Man. show less

The first section is exceptional. Love the intertextuality, the re-and mis-readings of fairy tales and Greek mythology. The rich network of allusions build towards a cultural idea of female/woman/girl that is made absurd, challenged, torn down, and interrogated. Beautifully crafted and conceived. The rest of the book didn't grab me as much, except for the one poem Inventing the Body that could have just as easily been part of the first section for its reaching outwards and storying.

Black Lawrence Press is known for publishing cutting-edge poetry and fiction in a style that is all thier own. Acadiana is a chapbook of poetry by Nancy Reddy. Reddy is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series. She teaches writing at Stockton University in southern New Jersey.

Growing up in the north the view I had of Acadiana which mostly came from popular music. “Amos Moses” and “The Legend of the Wooley Swamp” come to mind show more immediately. As an adult who migrated to Texas almost thirty years ago, I can say my most interesting travel stories are about Lousiana. Stories of Mr. Wilkes, trying to get a company car out of police impound, hand pumping gasoline, and being deep enough in the state that I could not even get AM radio in my car. There is something a different under the surface that you can catch out of the corner of your eye, sometimes.

Although a chapbook Reddy speaks volumes to the reader. The poetry is fairly standard in format but it captures the deepest of the South in a very big way. Surface Catholicism, left over from the French, covers a deep near voodoo topsoil. The words will give a tingle to your spine by the eerieness of the words and phrasing. There is something more to the words than just the words themselves just as there is more to the region than just the land and people.

As the red dog’s fur sends smoke skyward
to whatever gods may still watch over us,

I sprinkle holy water along the fence posts, place
the blessed palms along the shuttered windows
and above the doorframes. I make of matches a cross

and light them quick to stop the rain.

from “Saint Catherine Takes the Auspices”

This is a remarkable collection poetry that is much bigger than its thirty pages. Highly recommended. show less